


Cry for the grave

by fixwithgold



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (Just one but), Accidental Property Damage, Crying, Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mental Breakdown, Self-Hatred, Spiders, Suicidal Ideation, Tagged no archive warnings but I’m definitely warning, honestly almost all my fics are so much crying, this we know, yes the title is from an evanescence song yes i’m an emo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:40:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24520201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fixwithgold/pseuds/fixwithgold
Summary: Jon doesn’t realize how close he is to breaking until there’s a spider on the wall.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 106





	Cry for the grave

**Author's Note:**

> Please don’t read if you see any triggers in the tags! I tagged for things that even MIGHT be inferred from this work.

It is the middle of the night, Jon has just finished reclothing himself after a shower in the Institute's bathroom, and there is a spider on the wall. 

It's not a big one; it's really rather average, but the sheer knowledge of its presence, lurking above him, fills Jon with outrage. 

There is a closet nearby. He flings open the door and finds exactly what he wanted: a broom, old and used, bristles in every direction and rubber grip peeling off. 

When he returns, the spider has maneuvered itself up to the joint between the wall and the ceiling. Jon takes aim and jabs at it. He hits it dead-on. 

He wiggles the broom to further crush the wretched thing. It flies off of the wall, anchored by some invisible thread to the bristles of the broom and it's free-falling but stuck and Jon backs away frantically, hitting the broom on the shower curtain rod with a loud clang and managing to keep track of the oblong body and eight skittering legs as the spider tries to make its escape. 

He hits it again. It persists. He jabs, and he swipes, and he loses it within the broom and panics before finally shaking it, dead, to the ground. 

Two squares of toilet tissue, and the thing's corpse is squished up and thrown away. Jon's heart is still pounding as he surveys the room for more intruders, phantom crawling sensations plaguing his skin. And then he notices the curtain rod. 

It's lopsided, and Jon is sure it wasn't before. 

Carefully prodding at it reveals that it's slid down the wall, away from the spot it was plastered to, leaving an unsightly mark. He pushes it back up, slowly, his breath held tightly as if it might try to leave him before he's ready. 

The rod is in place. He lets go. It slides back down. It's broken. He's broken it. 

Jon slides down the wall to sit on the floor and he cries, and he laughs bitterly at the burning tears because really? This is his limit? A spider on the wall and a broken curtain rod and he can't take any more? Countless unspeakable horrors and what finally gets him is an arachnid and a hardware mishap? 

He half expects Helen to show up, leaning against her blasted door and laughing at him. But there's no door, just tears dripping silently down his face to land on his shirt, the room quiet but for his gasping sobs and the occasional residual drop of water from the faucet hitting porcelain. 

Jon wishes he'd waited for the spider to crawl back within reaching distance and then grabbed it, captured its writhing body in his hands and let it bite him. And he wishes that it had been a venomous species, and that he'd sat against the wall, as he did now, and waited for the poison to claim him. Would he die? Or would it simply leave him sick and useless, trapped in a poisoned body, alone and in eternal agony? 

No, this is his twisted fantasy, and he can have whatever death he wanted. A heart attack, maybe, right then and there. Or, no, a stroke, instantly fatal. 

But perhaps it would be more poetic for something to kill him. The same spider, back from the dead like that poor mummified arachnophobe. The Bone-Turner, suddenly there to take his flesh for his own. 

Jon curls in on himself and ignores the tears still flowing for the slain Institute property in favor of immersing himself in the thoughts of his own death and how lovely it would be, how convenient and good. And there he stays, letting time move past him.

Elias sends Martin to go find Jon the next morning. It takes surprisingly little time to find him, alone in the least-used shower room but for a broom and a lopsided curtain rod, knees pulled up to his chest, arms encircling them and hiding his face, shaking.


End file.
